Female porn

I’m sorry if you came to my site by Googling the above phrase but shouldn’t you be ashamed of yourself? The MPAA certainly thinks so, as evidenced by the investigation into its rating system that can be found in the amusing indie documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated which I just watched on DVD. Most of the press I saw had to do with director Kirby Dick’s attempts to learn the names of the anonymous judges who decide what rating movies will get, with NC-17 (no one under 17 allowed into the theater no matter how liberal your parents are) being the proverbial kiss of box office death.

But where he really makes his case is in the taboo arena of female pleasure. Bolstered by interviews with directors who grappled with the MPAA over an NC-17 rating (including Kevin Smith, Alison Anders and John Waters), This Film makes good use of the compare-and-contrast technique by alternating censored scenes of women (Chloe Sevigne in Boys Don’t Cry, Maria Bello in The Cooler) enjoying their orgasms — a lot — with any number of scenes from R and even PG-13 rated films in which sex is used to degrade and objectify women.

(My daughter, who will be 14 in a few weeks, tuned in at this point. She has probably seen more R-rated movies than I have in the last year, thanks to the lax monitoring done at the local cineplex, including the girl-hosing films of the American Pie stripe. It was, as they say, a teachable moment. Just the other day she told me, appropos of some song on the radio, that she liked a lot of rap but didn’t appreciate the fact that the guys rapping just wanted to use girls. Feminism lives.)

I haven’t polled any women about their reactions to the censored scenes mentioned above (both of which involved energetic displays of cunnilingus, performed by Hilary Swank and William H. Macy respectively) but I don’t actually know too many women who claim to be looking for good sex scenes in movies. And only a precious few that I have known will even admit to enjoying porn. I was reminded of all the derisive comments I have heard over the years about traditional porn from women: that the girls are just tools for fantasy, no different than an inflatable doll, that their characters are two-dimensional, even if their bodies are 3D. (“The acting is terrible and the plot is ridiculous,” as Julianne Moore says of “Logjammin’,” a porn video briefly glimpsed in The Big Lebowski.) Women don’t want cardboard cutouts in their fantasies; women want…Jude Law.

At least this is what I concluded watching another DVD of a film I had missed in theaters, Nancy Meyers’ The Holiday. Meyers’ movies often look like soft porn to me — the clean anonymous houses in which her characters are supposed to live, the fairy tale lighting, the lame music — but in Holiday she doubles her pleasure with the story of two women (played by Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet) who have suffered at the hands of caddish boyfriends and who swap houses over Christmas to discover, yes, true love.

Winslet’s character, an unhappy British newspaper scribe in the Bridget Jones’s tradition, gets the consolation prize in the form of a defanged Jack Black (you wait for his manic side to emerge in vain), while Diaz, coasting on her Goldie Hawn-like career of playing accomplished blonde ditzes, hits the jackpot when a drunken Jude Law arrives unannounced at her hobbit-like cottage. At first he seems to be playing to his nanny-shagging reputation (they fuck that first night hardly knowing each other’s names). But then he turns out to be a widower who is single-handedly raising two adorable girls who cries at the drop of a handkerchief. The perfect man: safe (widowed), nurturing (single dad), vulnerable (weepy) and virile though all the sex scenes between them are pre and post-coital. Their second encounter finds Diaz lying in bed sated — and still wearing her bra. I guess Meyers really wanted that PG-13 rating.

As Julianne Moore said of “Logjammin’,” “You can imagine where it goes from here.”

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